According to this story from Fox (fair warning), Capt. Yousef Yee, the Muslim chaplain at Camp X-Ray at Guantanemo Bay who was arrested on charges of treason, will be charged with such horrendous crimes as dereliction of duty and mishandling of classified information.
As I suspected, the charges against Yee were wildly overblown. There may be others against whom such charges are warranted, but the accusations against the translators seem to me to be particularly suspect. Simultaneous translation is a notoriously tricky business. Translators summarize and interpret - they're not just machines - and sometimes they foreshorten what they're translating in a way that can be, or can seem to be, misleading. Worse, Arabic words and phrases can have various meanings depending on context, more so than most languages. In such a situation, and in a poisoned atmosphere, it's easy to see how a review of a translator's work might seem suspicious.
There may be people working at X-Ray who tried to give classified information to foreign governments for the purpose of harming the United States. It's much more likely that people just doing their jobs are being caught up in a witchhunt. At worst, some of the employees may have tried to preserve a record of the condition of the prisoners, assuming that they will eventually be executed or held until they died. If a desire to record the last days of some condemned men led them to break the law, they should be punished, but not for treason.
We'll see how many more of these prosecutions fall apart.
Update January 4 2004: The persecution explained.
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